A DISCIPLINE IN SEARCH OF ITS PARADIGM: REFLECTIONS ON THE POST-BEHAVIORAL ERA IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

The intellectual development of political science, some have contended, has entered a postbehavioral phase. The 'behavioral revolution,' which became an identifiable phenomenon in contemporary political science during the 1950s & 1960s, was the attempt to make the discipline more empirical & methodologically self-conscious. The debates engendered by T. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) can be used to conceptualize the current methodological controversies in the discipline. Specifically, it is argued that political science contains both dual paradigmatic & proto-scientific elements. Those who share a scientific perspective generally adhere to either inductive or deductive schools of inquiry, whereas the normative & institutional focus of more traditionally oriented scholars points to what Kuhn has called a proto-science, that is, those disciplines which do not or cannot aspire to a paradigmatic-oriented scientific discipline. The new focus political scientists are giving to policy analysis implicity reflects the aforementioned methodology controversies. AA.